Trump rages against wind turbines / Germany powers France

US president elect Donald Trump’s negative comments on wind power in a recent interview with the New York Times present a concern for both the domestic and international wind sector, writes Franz Hubik in Handelsblatt. “Trump made clear that climate protection and renewable energies are not a priority for him. The conditions for wind turbine manufacturers could significantly worsen in the United States under Trump,” Sven Diermeier, analyst at Independent Research, told Handelsblatt. German companies like Siemens and Nordex could suffer. Hermann Albers, president of German Wind Energy Association (BWE), is more optimistic: “Renewables are domestic forms of energy that actually support his goal to strengthen the US economy and employment. We should debate this with the Americans.”

Germany’s oversupply of electricity could aid France this winter during its expected power supply shortage due to safety concerns in 18 of its 58 nuclear reactors, writes Jürgen Flauger in Handelsblatt. “In Germany, there is enough power capacity that could be mobilised. Since the energy transition […] so many wind turbines and solar rooftops have been installed that many coal- and natural gas-fired power plants are seldom used to full capacity,” writes Flauger.

Germany will not be able to reach its greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction target of 40 percent, compared to 1990, according to a draft of the federal environment ministry’s Climate Protection Report 2016, seen by Tagesspiegel. The targets set for the transport sector are especially likely to be missed, writes Dagmar Dehmer. “All of the […] measures in the transport sector lead to less CO₂ reduction than projected by the federal government.” The environment ministry will discuss the report with interest groups this week and plans to publish a final version in December.

Carmakers in Germany need to embrace a global “disruptive” shift in mobility by adjusting their production to the looming dominance of e-cars, Peter Altmaier, Chief of the German Chancellery, said at the “Agenda 2017” conference of Tagesspiegel in Berlin. Altmaier warned that a large part of the car industry’s value creation, such as the development of batteries, could happen abroad after a complete shift towards e-cars. The automotive industry faces an innovation cycle that “is not based on combustion engines” but on autonomous vehicles and electric power systems, putting the future role of current market leaders in doubt, according to the minister.

The cooling water in many of Europe’s nuclear power plants is pre-heated to prevent brittle steel in reactor pressure vessels from breaking, writes Michael Bauchmüller in Süddeutsche Zeitung. “It continues to become more complicated to reach exactly the temperature that is low enough to cool the reactor and at the same time high enough not to endanger the vessel,” writes Bauchmüller. It was not clear how many reactors in Europe were affected. No nuclear power plants in Germany currently use pre-heated water “because of the current material condition or the one expected at the end of its lifetime”, the federal environment ministry told Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Costs connected to the German Energiewende and high industry power prices could hurt the country as a location for business investments, Willem Huisman, president of the chemicals company Dow Germany, told the German Chemicals Industry Association (VCI) in an interview for its website. “Let me make clear: Many investment decisions currently are not in favour of Europe or Germany. This gradual process has already been started and could ban Germany to the last league concerning investments, solely because of the country’s energy policy,” said Huisman.

Climate-friendly infrastructures in cities provide urban planners with a large potential for emission reduction, according to a new study by Felix Creutzig (lead author) from the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) and others, published in Nature Climate Change. “Indeed, 'going green’ now in terms of infrastructure and buildings could cut future emissions in half or about 10 gigatonnes CO₂ per year from 2040 onwards - the same quantity that is currently being emitted by the United States, Europe and India together,” writes MCC in a press release. “Urban planning and transport could become a major roadblock to reaching the two-degree-target. Once infrastructures are in place, they determine carbon emissions for nearly an entire century - much longer even than coal-fired power stations,” said Creutzig.

Read the press release in English here and buy the nature article here.

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